


pieta

by Mythopoeia



Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [254]
Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Angst, As in Maedhros was the one tortured, Bedside Vigils, Celegorm and Fingon do a Group Project, Celegorm swears a lot, Gen, Hair Washing, Healing, Huan Is A Good Dog, Major Character Injury, Making Up Quarrels - Almost, Medicine, Missing Scene, Mithrim, POV First Person, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Mae Waking Up, We also all know this, You Didn’t Think We Were NOT Going To Write The Hair Washing Scene Did You, and Celegorm Stays a Problematic Boy, but we all know this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-16
Updated: 2020-06-16
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:34:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24760894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mythopoeia/pseuds/Mythopoeia
Summary: My hand is finger bones, knuckle bones, carpal bones, wrist. Carpal is a fine word I learned from one of the books in Fingon’s study, years ago; phalange is another. I don’t know where the words go, but I know them.I close my fist, grind it tight, and feel the bone-sharp shape of myself waiting beneath my skin.“Let me help.”
Relationships: Celegorm | Turcafinwë & Fingon | Findekáno, Celegorm | Turcafinwë & Maedhros | Maitimo
Series: All That Glitters Gold Rush!AU: The Full Series [254]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1300685
Comments: 7
Kudos: 20





	pieta

I don’t want to see what they did to Maitimo, which is foolish considering that I already did see, yesterday. Saw and bolted from the tent like a frightened pup, like a goddamned coward. I shouldn’t have felt the way I did, not after the things I’ve seen before—dead things and dying things and things I’ve killed, even, with knife and bullet and ashwood arrows—but nothing’s scared me like that in a long, long time. It was like Maitimo was sleeping, in the bed, and when I tore the blanket back, I killed him. 

Nonsense. Blood doesn’t mean death. Burning doesn’t mean death. Even mutilation, even desecration, doesn’t mean death.

Not always, anyway.

I watch now as Fingon in his doctoring reveals, excruciatingly slowly, every torturous thing that was done to my brother, these past months. Most of his injuries are healed: the burns, the flayed skin, the sunken pit in his shoulder where his foolish tattoo used to be. The injuries that need tending now are chiefly the cuts to his face, the stump of his right wrist, and the knife-cut words that are carved across his skin.

 _Feanorian_ , I saw in the tent. 

I did not see the other, because I fled.

Oh, god, Maitimo. 

The letters cleanly and deeply cut, clearly legible, which means he must not have fought, when they were carved. That means—he was tied down? He was unconscious? 

_Six months._

I swallow so that I am not sick.

When I see what they did to my brother’s leg, and I realize they crippled him as well as took his hand, I reach to touch him before I realize what I am doing. 

“Don’t hurt him!” Fingon says, sharply, which is the most goddamn stupid thing he _could_ say, looking at Maedhros the way he is. I almost tell him so, but I bite my tongue instead, so hard that I taste blood.

Maitimo’s skin is not cold, no matter the broken shape his bones make beneath it. 

*

When Fingon spoons the thin broth between Maitimo’s dry lips, I help by holding my brother’s head in my lap, my hands cradling the back of his neck.

“Careful of his neck,” says Fingon, and for an instant I am dumbfounded because how can he know? But then I feel it beneath my fingers—an unnatural pattern warping the skin at the back of my brother’s neck, over the bones there. Something must change, in my face, because Fingon makes an expression I recognize from when we were children, when he was trying not to cry.

“Estrela says it is an eye. The picture they cut there. The scar is closed up but it is deep enough that—At least it won’t be visible, with his hair.”

Estrela is the slave woman with one eye missing.

“As if he will care if a scar like that is visible or not,” I say, cruelly, “when his fucking _hand_ is gone.”

Fingon goes white, at that. Grey as a ghost, and doesn’t say a word.

He must think I am accusing him of failure, for not saving my brother before he was reduced to _this_. Well, maybe I am. But I hate that failure in myself at least as much as I hate it in him. 

(The scar Thuringwethil left is still visible, too, from where I sit. It is lost amidst the other, more recent injuries, and I do not think Fingon has noticed it. I only see it because I know where to look; because I remember when it mattered.)

(Maitimo had been so ashamed, over that single mark.)

“I put out his eye,” Fingon says, suddenly, still pale to the lips. “The man who hurt him.”

My head snaps up. Huan’s head snaps up, too. He always knows when we are hunting.

“You met him?”

“I fought him on the mountain, to get Maedhros free. I stabbed him, but he fled. I didn’t go after him. He may be dead.”

“You should have ripped him apart.” 

My voice, strangled, does not sound like my voice. 

Fingon does not argue, but he looks away from me: back to the body in the bed.

“I had to choose,” he murmurs.

*

(“Mairon,” Fingon answers me, and it is like I am thrust suddenly back into the beating heart of my boy-self, hammering wild, staring through the sweet pine-dark at a man who moved like a wild creature, a man who raised his bared teeth towards my brother’s moonlit face and _hungered._ )

_(I will teach you something you do not want to know.)_

*

“You?” Fingon looks at me with open skepticism. I want to slap the look off his face; I concentrate instead on curling my fingers tight and hidden into my palm, one at a time. There are lines on palms that some people say can tell your future, and when I make a fist I can feel the map of them clearly, cut deeper where my fingernails fit cleanly in.

My hand is finger bones, knuckle bones, carpal bones, wrist. Carpal is a fine word I learned from one of the books in Fingon’s study, years ago; phalange is another. I don’t know where the words go, but I know them. 

I close my fist, grind it tight, and feel the bone-sharp shape of myself waiting beneath my skin. 

“I can help.”

“You don’t even wash your own hair, by the look of it.”

Fingon wears his hair in neat braids, like the kind I saw the northern natives wear, when I traded my prayer medal for a longbow long, long ago. His hair is clean and combed and made pretty with yellow thread. 

Made pretty with woven yellow thread, while my brother is—my brother looks—

Who the hell does he think he is?

“I wash Huan’s,” I say, and put my hand out to seize the pail. Fingon tenses, and I think he wants to pull away, but he doesn’t dare to, because that might spill the water. 

“Celegorm,” he says, angry, but I am angry too. There is more anger in me than in my cousin. My anger is the sort that comes from knowing what anything would look like dead—even Fingon. 

Even _him._

My hand is still a fist, but a fist can’t pick up a knife.

“Celegorm,” my cousin says, and I cut him off. 

“You hold his head,” I tell him. “Because I don’t know how to move him, and I don’t know how to keep his breathing going, and I don’t know how to mix your medicines or touch him without hurting him. But I know how to wash his fucking hair.”

I don’t cry. Why would I cry?

I’m not even sure I said all the words I think I said, in the rush just now. I feel the silence in the room pressing on my ears like open hands. I swallow, hard, and the bones in my fist move like hiding things sometimes do, when they are afraid. 

“Let me help,” I say, harshly, and Fingon is still staring at me as though he would like to force me out of the room.

Let him try. Let him try to lay a single goddamn finger on me, a single _bloody_ hand—

Fingon releases the pail.

“All right,” he mutters. “I’ll lift his head.”

*

There is no change in Maitimo’s face, when Fingon’s hands cup gently beneath his head and lift carefully, supporting his neck the way you have to support the necks of infant things. He draws the pillow away, and I help pull my brother’s hair free from where it had lain trapped beneath his skull, arranging it so it falls over the back of the cot, where Fingon has replaced the pillow with the new cloth the slave woman brought, folded in thirds. 

Nothing moves in Maitimo’s face when Fingon lowers him again, either. He could almost be dead. 

But he isn’t. 

I tried not to look at the slave woman, when she stopped to set the water beside me, and then I tried too hard not to look away, as she straightened up. I think she noticed both times. I was afraid she might linger, like women usually do around Maitimo, but she left almost as soon as she reappeared, closing the door behind her. 

She had wanted to cut off my brother’s hair. After preaching at us as though she presumed to know more about Maitimo than we do, than _I_ do! Doesn’t she know Maitimo is vain about his hair? It would kill him, to wake up and find it gone. 

Maglor used to comb Maitimo’s hair, sometimes, and he looked full like our mother when he did it, full of fawning softness. Folk used to say Maitimo had our mother’s hair, but that wasn’t true, because her hair was wilder and coarser, more like—like Amras. Maitimo’s hair is more like mine. It’s just the color that is different. 

A color nearly impossible to tell, now, for it is thick with matted grime and foul with sweat and old blood. There is no tangle to work out, because it is as though the whole of his hair has been woven together, locked and snarled in impossible knots. I hate the feel of it in my hands. I would have hated more to feel the scarring again that I felt before, behind his head—but this, too, is ruin. I pull my hands away.

I have to sit very close to Fingon, like this, because Fingon is still holding Maitimo’s head still. 

If Maitimo woke now, he would see both our faces, first. 

“Try wetting it a little, perhaps,” Fingon suggests, frowning. He moves one hand absently to stroke the hair back smoother from Maitimo’s bruised forehead, and I almost hit his hand away. Instead, I dip my hands into the pail and hesitantly begin to pour water over my brother’s hair, just enough to moisten it, and to begin to work my fingers into the mess. We set the basin beneath the head of the cot, to catch water running down from his hair, and the trickle that forms is almost black. 

Maitimo doesn’t move. 

Back in Beleriand—or even farther back, when he was shot at the bridge and Maglor would insist on fretting over the wound every night—he trembled. Even when the wounds scarred over, Maitimo’s hands would shake, sometimes; I pretended not to notice, but I always saw. That is what pain looked like, in my brother. 

He does not tremble now. The only life in him is the air that rasps in and out of his mouth, forcing his broken ribs to rise and fall. I look at the stillness of his face, crooked as it is from my awkward angle, and I feel the air choke up in my own throat, sour and hot. 

I want to see my brother alive again, but all I can think as I look at him breathing is how he should be dead. Not left alive to suffer like this—the pain, and the indignity, and the loss. They cut off his hand, _fuck_ , they maimed him and crippled him and cut into him—twice at least, they cut into him—

Goddamn them, what was it all _for_? What was it all for, if not to kill him? 

“Here,” says Fingon, and pushes the bar of soap into my own suddenly trembling hands. I blink down at Maitimo’s hair where it straggles through my fingers, limp and ragged and helpless. I have worked some knots loose, it seems, without realizing what I was doing.

I still feel like I am suffocating, but Fingon is watching, so I scrub the soap to a lather in my hands, mechanically, and rub it into Maitimo’s hair. I try to be gentle, but when I pull my fingers free, clumps of my brother’s hair come away too, the way skin sloughs off a corpse. As delicately and as easily as Huan’s hair comes free, when winter is over. 

“Celegorm, have a care!” That is Fingon, admonishing somewhere near me, but I cannot look to glare at him, because my brother’s hair has come loose in my palms, and my beautiful brother who cultivated only this one vanity does not move, or protest, or do anything at all, except breathe. 

He is not dead. Maedhros was dead, six months he was dead, but he isn’t now, because his corpse was left still breathing. 

I want to tear the throats out of the men who did this, to cut them open as I cut open their messenger at our gate, but with my own fingers this time, with my tongue and my teeth. I want to leave them handless, eyeless, gaping, rotting, hideous in the river mud, their hair full black with water—

Huan, nosing at my knee, huffs quietly. I can not touch him, with my hands full of soap and my brother’s dead hair, but he lifts his great head to lick along my elbow anyway, reassuring and warm. He does not whine, or whimper, or cry. 

Instead, he turns, and rests his jaw peacefully on the coverlet beside Maitimo’s left hand. My dog’s tail thumps once, twice, against the floor. 

My dog thinks I should be happy, because my brother has come home breathing. 

I rinse my hands, and the hair floats free in the soap scum. Fingon, uncharacteristically, fell silent after his first outburst; even more uncharacteristically, he now offers me an explanation. My cousin always did like to lecture, but never to me. 

“He is badly malnourished,” Fingon says, his voice tight. “He was—starving, when I found him. His hair will grow back, as he heals.”

“I know that,” I snap, but I resume washing Maitimo’s hair in silence. Some more strands do fall free, but I discard them into the pail without looking. Slowly, his hair that remains begins to feel clean beneath my fingers. Slowly, I untangle the snarls and comb them loose with my fingers. It is like setting a snare in the woods, but reversed: ropes unwinding, tension releasing, knots untied. The cloth beneath my brother’s head is quite soaked through, by the time I am done. 

My brother. My brother returned from the dead. My brother who was never dead at all. 

*

“There, that’s better,” Fingon sighs, leaning back and wiping his forearm across his face. He looks more tired than I have ever seen him. “He looks much more himself again, doesn’t he?”

A peace offering. I don’t take it. 

The wet cloth drops to the floor with a heavy slapping sound, when Fingon removes it from the bed. He lays the pillow over the damp spot it left on the pallet, and a rag over the pillow. There are wet rags strewn about the floor near my feet, too, because that is where I dropped them after using them to gently wring the water from my brother’s hair. I don’t think I’ll pick them up. Fingon can clean the mess. 

I lay Maitimo’s head back down onto the pillow. I want to lay my head beside his, too, to listen to the pattern of his breathing, but I don’t, because Fingon is watching. Instead, I push back from the bed and I stand, ungraceful. Huan follows me with his eyes, but that’s all. He knows where I need him, because he always knows. His head is still resting patiently next to Maitimo’s hand. Close enough to touch, if Maitimo would only raise a finger and reach.

Huan is glad because the brother I want came home. But the brother I want would have returned with another brother at his heels—would have laughed as he showed me his hurts, or as he cursed the names of the fools who tried to kill him—would have lain just like this, asleep, and then woken to look at me with clear eyes, because Maitimo would not have drunk anything, after finding Amrod. I know the kinds of bargains my brother made. 

_Hullo, Celegorm,_ he would have said, sleep-stupid but smiling, not quite hiding the tremble in his hands. Both his hands. 

_Jesus, is it night already? How long have I been asleep? And you just sitting here and letting me?_

_You shouldn’t have let me._

*

Maitimo sleeps, and does not wake up. The breathing fights in and out of him; his mouth is slightly open, like he’s thinking of speaking, but no words come. I try to picture this face smiling, and I can’t. I fight, very hard, to recognize what Mairon and Bauglir left behind. 

Maitimo’s hair is much shorter than I remember, now that it is combed out, but it is still long enough to spread over the pillow like a sunburst, like the halos saints wear in church windows. 

Martyrs, most of them. Beautiful and placid even with the blood dripping through their fingers. 

Nothing human about their pain, at all.


End file.
